This blog was originally published two years ago. We’ll be revisiting this with a three-part series and updating these thoughts with a new WNST “State of Baltimore Sports Media” survey next week while we broadcast live from Indianapolis all week. This is Part 2 of 5: The State of Baltimore Sports Media (circa 2010).

A friend of mine in San Franciscio has an awesome bar called Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant on Geary Street in the Richmond District. It’s one of my favorite places on earth. Full of chips, salsa, guacamole and stiff margaritas, the night before the AFC Championship Game in 2001 we hung out there with more Ravens fans than the place can hold. I was there three weeks ago and have shot several video segments for wnsTV from Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant over the years.

Over the Bay Area’s largest tequila bar, my pal Julio Bermejo (the U.S. Ambassador & world expert on 100% agave tequila) has a bunch of fun signs with slogans and axioms.

Here’s my favorite:

“Tommy’s encourages you to visit our competitors!”

I just love that. Because it’s exactly how we feel at WNST.net. Go ahead and scan the dial, surf the web, Facebook and Twitter away with our competitors – you’ll come back to us.

It’s our solemn goal and daily mission to make it mandatory that you come back to WNST.net every day for your Baltimore sports news, information and conversation because we think our content and observations are the best in the market.

The sign at Tommy’s is a symbol of excellence and the ultimate statement of self-confidence in one’s own product/expertise/value. It ain’t bragging if you can back it up, right?

It says we’re so good, you’ll remember us — and you’ll be back because we have the best information, the most accurate information and the most informed opinion, analysis and insights in the marketplace.

Oh, and unlike the others who are being paid “hush money” to cough and look the other way by the teams that they’re ostensibly asked to assess, evaluate and analyze with “integrity,” you always know you’re always going to get the truth from us.

For the first time in the history of WNST as a company dating back to 1998, we’re finally getting a fair shake on the measurement of our product on the web to know just how many people really are “coming back” each day.

I’ve been doing sports radio for 18 years. I have never read an Arbitron report that says we have more than 500 listeners. Most times, it lists us as the 52nd radio station in the market and sometimes we’ve fallen to ZERO listeners in their antiquated and useless monthly surveys. One local advertising agent has spent the past two decades calling us a “little station with a ‘cult’ following.” (After 18 years, nothing could be more insulting or further from the truth.)

And if you check the latest Arbitron numbers – we lovingly call them the “arbitraries” – you’ll see that once again NONE of you seem to listen to WNST.

☺

Yep, we’re back at “zero point zero” – kind of like Bluto in “Animal House.”

But to the amazement of everyone in the Baltimore media world, suddenly, we’re so far ahead of the pack in every WEB measurement that it defies all of the “millions of dollars of research” that Arbitron has invested in proving that places like WNST-AM 1570 and brands like WNST.net aren’t effective.

But somehow, we have well over 40,000 people in our sphere here in Baltimore (at least that’s how many we’ve been able to account for so far) and displaced local sports fans across the country who’ve been kind and trusting enough to give us their email, mobile number, Facebook or Twitter access. We’ve got over 10,000 on our registration to the website and more 12,000 in our Facebook sphere alone! And there are certainly thousands of other folks who just “lurk” in our sphere, reading but never commenting, registering or playing any of our games for cash and prizes. Just like the thousands of you who have been listening to WNST-AM 1570 for years and have never received a dairy to fill out.

Every day thousands of you are coming regularly to WNST.net – via our website, Twitter, Facebook or a myriad of other connections — for any of the variety of media and information we offer.

Against the marketplace over the past dozen years, WNST has been cheated out of millions of dollars of market revenue but the game is “fixed” — at least as far as radio is concerned. Arbitron’s reporting is so fundamentally flawed and skewed that it’d be laughable if it didn’t cause me to fire people and lose money on a measurement system that is so antiquated I find it hard to believe that anyone could take it seriously.

For the first 17 years of my radio existence and as recently as last spring, Arbitron was sending out a paper diary in an envelope with a stamp via snail mail and the USPS to various (and random) home mailboxes with a $1 bill (and later $2) inside asking you